'Please Like Me' star Josh Thomas really regrets dressing like Eminem

Josh Thomas is no stranger to a bottle of peroxide. During his awkward teen years, the Please Like Me creator and star emulated Slim Shady’s style, much to his own chagrin when he looks back now.

Fortunately, Thomas is well past his teen years as PLM picks up for a new season. Though the penultimate episode of the first season centered on Josh’s (Thomas) 21st birthday, the latest batch of episodes take place a few years later. Thomas jokes, “We just had to go a bit farther forward because my face is falling apart. I look not-as-radiant as when I was 21.”

In addition to a new baby stepsister, Josh and his best friend Tom (Thomas Ward) have picked up a third roommate named Patrick (Charles Cottier), who piques a still-single Josh’s interest. Thomas says the chemistry with Patrick is “not as, like, ‘SEX!’ as [it was with] Geoffrey.” Geoffrey, for those who haven’t watched the Australian series (which airs on Pivot), is Josh’s ex played by Wade Briggs. Thomas promises the fan favorite will make a return: “Everybody wanted more of Geoffrey,” he admits. “Tumblr just wants Geoffrey to be naked all the time.”

Thomas says he “totally” gets where that impulse but is resisting the temptation to write an all-nude Geoffrey episode… at least for now. “I could do it!” he says. “The network is really easygoing; they trust my creative vision. I could say, ‘There’s this half-hour episode where Geoffrey’s just naked and, like, touching himself.’ I could come up with a creative justification… but it’s just not very compelling plot-wise, you know? So I had to not do it; I had to write, like, stories. When we kind of give up in a few [seasons], we’ll do that.”

Instead, Josh will continue to live a relatively simple—but profoundly amusing—life and receive “a constant amount of gentle sass” from his friends and family. As such, Thomas vows not to go the soap opera route with PLM: “You can get ridiculous with these stories over time where everyone’s dating everybody and everything’s happened to the same character: ‘He has cancer and then two months later he’s getting married.’ In soap operas, they have these wild lives, but we don’t want to do that, so we’re… keeping it a bit more honest.”

Below, Thomas gets honest about everything from his bottle-blonde locks to his fondness for Will & Grace’s Jack McFarland when he takes EW’s Pop Culture Personality Test.

Bonus: Thomas promises his beloved cavoodle, John, will get a stylish makeover in season 2.
“John has a lot of little outfits this time around,” Thomas says. “Last season, we were filming, and I said after a few weeks, ‘We need to do more with John. We’ve really missed a beat here.’ So we put John in a dress in one scene. [But the thing is] there’s staff—that’s someone’s job. That was my favorite thing: John having to go in for a wardrobe fitting. They weren’t sure whether the dress for John was from the props department, because they look after the animals, or the wardrobe department, because it’s clothing. So there were these meetings where we weren’t sure whose department John’s dress was going to come from. [Laughs] I just love that so much—all these people working on John’s dress. So now he has a lot of outfits. He’s dressed as a pumpkin at one stage. He’s Thelma or Louise – the baby plays the other one, but I don’t know which one’s which. What else? There’s a beautiful tuxedo. John doesn’t [have a preference between dresses and tuxedos]. He doesn’t believe in gender boundaries or gender constructs. He’s against the patriarchy and stuff.”